Using CSS in web site development

Last week we discussed using CSS in web site development. There was some discussion in the class about sources for learning more about CSS, and one of the class members sent me this email message, which I post for the benefit of all class participants, quote:

"At the Internet Marketing clinic last Wednesday I referenced some books on Cascading Style Sheets.

To me, the best to start with is "Eric Meyer on CSS" by Eric Meyer. Each chapter goes through a project, starting with one on converting a page to the use of CSS. All of the code is available for downloading.

Eric Meyer also wrote "Cascading Style Sheets, The Definitive Guide" published by O'Reilly. This is an excellent reference. After going through "Eric Meyer on CSS" I could get much more out of The Definitive Guide.

After some experience with Front Page, I found I could do very well with Notepad. I open one Notepad for html and one for css. I then bring up IE and do File>Open to open my Notepad html in IE. I can then edit both the html and css and do a refresh to see the results in IE. I do the same with FireFox. IE is the most widely used browser, but it is quite lenient when it comes to standards. FireFox is much more demanding on standards and thus makes for better code.

I haven't used Dreamweaver, but I understand it is very good as well.

A very effective diagnostic tool is the W3C validation service. It can be found at http://www.w3schools.com/site/site_validate.asp. This service can be used to validate both html and css."

Thanks to Don Healy for this contribution!